Spring RTS Engine

Well, seeing as everyone else is comenting...

I do like it BUT:
1) Think teh camo problem is probablie that its to vivid. Maybe if you just made the yellow a little less saturated it would look better?

2) There is very little team colour on it, so it would get hard to see whos was whos at a glance. Maybe you could make the housing for teh barrels have teh team colour? (housing not the turrets)

Other than that I think its great! Maybe teh treds could be more goliath like, but It's not an important thing, liek you said this makes it stand out as different.

aGorm

hehe, quick eye chocapic, there are some adv solars in the back, and if you look carefully, its evolva units, and scale, look at that gollie and the reaper aside it.

Actually, it's my current hacked-up XTA, which I mess with occasionally to test certain things. Sorry if that is confusing. It does have the Evolva 3DOs in it.

I'll take one more whack at the skin, and try to make more obvious teamcolors, de-emphasize the camo, and add more metal.

I'm not really interested in building a new model for it- the time it takes to build the model, uvmap it, and then get it animated makes that impractical. Sorry, it's not like 3DO, where you just throw a new texture on the face, or bring in a new set- because of Spring's limitation to one uvmap per model, I have to do it all in one go, and that means rebuilding the S3O again, which is annoying.

I see no reason to go higher poly- that would make the model not fit with XTA well. Now that I've seen Caydr's tests, my own mods will feature fairly high polycounts, but XTA's models are very conservative, and I intend to keep it at the same rough level.

they are never happy argh... if it helps rape the texture I sent you. That was too dark and too metal.. maybe if you combine both our textures a middle ground that people can agrea about will exist.

Here we go. I figured out what I needed to do to get team-textures working perfectly... it's a little counter-intuitive.

SYs? Yes or no. This is as much time as I can give you.



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Maybe have the lights on the front change colour too.

Das Bruce wrote:Maybe have the lights on the front change colour too.

That would look silly on ceartin coulors. Grey lights? I think not.


Nice work. I think that fits perfectly.

It has a giant bullethole decal in the tread O_o

I'm not really interested in building a new model for it- the time it takes to build the model, uvmap it, and then get it animated makes that impractical. Sorry, it's not like 3DO, where you just throw a new texture on the face, or bring in a new set- because of Spring's limitation to one uvmap per model, I have to do it all in one go, and that means rebuilding the S3O again, which is annoying.

I can't stop advertising this: Use upspring "Export for UV mapping" and "Import UV coordinates from model".

You can re-UV a model that way, without needing to assemble the parts again.

I wonder why the SY's dont say a word..

Very nice model, very nice texture. A suggestion though, most TA units have a bit more team colour than that. You know the top shell-like structure of it, it has these parts on its left and right that are flat on the Y axis. Could those be made all-teamcolour, or maybe have a stripe on them... something that can be seen from high-ish altitude.

Could those be made all-teamcolour, or maybe have a stripe on them... something that can be seen from high-ish altitude.

That's what the yellow blocks are. Does everybody need to see it in blue, red, etc.? It works, and it's quite clear what teamcolor it's using, but I can make it bigger.

I wonder why the SY's dont say a word..

I am rather mystified myself. The Raven was accepted very quickly, and with hardly any revisions. I am a little frustrated at the lack of feedback here. I suspect that a lot of it is because it's S3O, the future of Spring, and that makes it a somewhat big deal

It has a giant bullethole decal in the tread O_o

No, that's just a greeble. Closeups show a "hidden layer" of dirty metal behind it, but it's in shadow and on darker screens, it no doubt just looks like a hole. If people find that obnoxious or confusing, I suppose I could remove it.

Use upspring "Export for UV mapping" and "Import UV coordinates from model".

I should probably do an article demonstrating what that does, and why it causes some problems on a practical, workflow level. Really, Zaphod- please, just trust me, I've been doing uvmapped models for about three years now... you want to do it all in one go. While what you're saying is, in an absolute sense, true... it's just not the best way to go about things. If Spring supported more than one uvmap per model, it'd be a different story, but that's how it works, and I have to deal with that.

If the SYs wanted a more detailed model, or had a more specific idea about the kinds of turrets, colors, etc... you just had to specify them. Yeha's instructions were vague, and I interpreted them in a way that I thought would fit the current game design. I'm not going to put this through any more cycles of revision until I get feedback from the people who have to approve the piece.

It's your mod, SYs. I have mine to work on. If I were an official team member, it'd be a different story, but I'm just another freelancer contributing to the project.

Argh, you seem very knowledgeable in all that modeling thing, however:

aGorm wrote:...
2) There is very little team colour on it, so it would get hard to see whos was whos at a glance. ...

Caydr wrote:... most TA units have a bit more team colour than that. ...

You should take that more to heart.
Look at SupCom's units. The team colour is, probably, more than half the unit.

I don't personally care for seeing that much teamcolor- it's ugly and not at all realistic- who would paint their tanks bright red IRL? Supacom's art does not excite me all that much thus far- the rendering engine's pretty darn neato, but we shall see whether big blobs of team-color plays well or just looks like a visual blur. Sorry if that offends everybody.

However, since I seem to have talked myself into ONE more set of minor tweaks, I might as well add s'more teamcolor.

The trend for most TA units seems to be to do as little painting as possible. With the exception of the cont and a few other select units not too many units have alot of painted stuff that isn't teamcolor.

[edit] of those that do have painting how many are core? The goli sure isn't painted up.

Here we go. More metal, more teamcolor, more Krogoth-like. This is definately the last day I can spend on this- I have to concentrate on NanoBlobs now.

I will be happy to post the geometry and my PSDs for anybody who thinks they can do better

I say keep the yellow texture at that same opacity, but have the yellow be team color. So if it were red the whole thing would be red etc. I think that would work really well if you keep it at that low brightness and have the other team colors stay full bright.

This is the final version. I am done here. Either PM for it, SYs... or don't. I am not putting up with more of this silly crap.

<stalks off in grumpy mood>

I very much like the metal version. It looks quite nasty.

now THAT's a TA unit.

Excelent work. I really think it will be nuff for the SY's.